Answering the call to glass science, undergrad wins ACerS award

Lauren Russo set herself a steep learning curve the summer before her senior year when she started her research project in materials science and engineering.

Russo had not yet studied glass science or photonic materials, topics typically covered in the senior year or in graduate school, when she asked Prof. Himanshu Jain about research opportunities.

Jain, a world-renowned glass expert, invited Russo to study chalcogenide glass photoresists. Chalcogenide glasses are being proposed for use in the fabrication of integrated optics. Photoresists, chemical substances whose solubility is controlled by exposure to light, enable engineers to image patterns onto a substrate, such as a silicon chip.

"I have always been interested in ground-breaking new techniques," says Russo, "but I went into this project completely blind. I knew very little of chalcogenide glass or glass structure."

Russo worked on her project for one summer and both semesters of her senior year, learning on the job from Lehigh visiting scientists Ashtosh Ganjoo and Mirek Vlcek, two of the world's leading experts in chalcogenide glasses.

She also accompanied Jain on two visits to the Army Research Laboratory in Adelphi, Maryland. ARL, which funds Jain's research, hopes to use the materials that Jain is developing to create MEMS (microelectromechanical systems) and NEMS (nanoelectromechanical systems) devices.

Last month, Russo gave a power-point presentation about her research at the annual conference of the American Ceramics Society in Indianapolis and won second prize in the Undergraduate Speaking Contest.

Russo gave her presentation twice at the ACS conference. In the second, more formal talk, she spoke for 15 minutes and answered questions from practicing engineers and faculty members.

In the laboratory, Russo used a photoresist to create sub-micron patterns on a silicon chip. The chalcogenide photoresist, being photo-sensitive, changed chemical and optical properties when illuminated.

To do her research, Russo had to work in the dark to avoid white light sources. She used a variety of equipment, including a thermal evaporation system, a halogen white light source, a monochromatic light source, a detector and a spectrometer, and optical microscopes to observe the sub-micron-level details and patterns.

In one experiment, Russo was able to use light to induce silver to diffuse into an arsenic-sulfide chalcogenide surface. The goal of this process is to make the glass substrate stronger and more protective. Russo compared the in-situ etching kinetics of silver arsenic-sulfide with those of arsenic-sulfide. She altered the variables slightly, changing the thickness of the sample and the amount of light exposure. The tinkering yielded dramatically different results in resolution, selectivity and kinetics.

"This was a complicated project for an undergraduate," she says. "But I really enjoyed it because it was so different. Typically, materials science involves a lot of work in metals and microscopy  and the characterization of materials."

After graduating from Lehigh, Russo will go to work for W.L. Gore & Associates in Newark, Delaware, which manufactures advanced technology products for the electronics, industrial, fabrics and medical markets and is perhaps best known for its fabric and guitar strings.

She will work with polymers, another mostly new material for her, but she believes she will benefit by having learned about glass from scratch.

"It's going to be a whole different learning experience," she says. "I'll get to start on a brand new project."

At Lehigh, Russo also enjoyed her IPD (integrated product development) project, a one-year class required of all materials science and engineering majors. IPD students work in teams, often with students from business, the arts and other engineering disciplines, to design and make products for industrial sponsors.

Russo's team, sponsored by Graco Children's Products Inc. of Exton, Pa., developed a new child-safety gate. Russo was the only materials science major on the team; the other five members were all mechanical engineering majors.

"It was very helpful to see different types of engineers, and it was a good contrast to other materials courses. We had to use a lot more common sense and creativity in IPD.

"We did a lot of product research and consumer research. We visited day care centers, bought gates, and took them apart to figure out what improvements people wanted to see. We did a financial study, we tried to determine demand and we projected production costs."

Outside engineering, Russo played an active role in Greek life on campus. She served as president of her sorority, Alpha Omicron Pi, as VP of Lehigh's PanHellenic organization, an umbrella group for the university's sororities, and as VP of the Order of Omega, an honorary and service society for academically top-ranking Greek students.

As VP of Panhel, Russo also served on the Greek Life Task Force, which has made recommendations to Lehigh's administration to strengthen Lehigh's Greek system.

"Serving on the task force was an invaluable learning experience for me," says Russo. "It gave me a chance to interact with Lehigh administrators and it opened doors for me to a lot of people I would not have otherwise met, a very broad, diverse group of people.

"One of the best things about Lehigh is that the extracurricular activities that are available give you a very well-balanced experience, which is as important as the academic work. You can't spend all your time dealing with the technical side of engineering."